Hats off to MSI - they do a good job of satisfying those of us the big two somehow can't (or won't) reach despite having dozens of SKUs. For me MSI are the spiritual successors to Abit's crown in that regard.

Hats off to MSI - they do a good job of satisfying those of us the big two somehow can't (or won't) reach despite having dozens of SKUs. For me MSI are the spiritual successors to Abit's crown in that regard.

One thing i don't get is why manufactures put Marvel controllers on MoBo's
I know the article says about using them for E-SATA, but im guessing not many people do.
The amount of times you read about people getting slow speeds from SSD's only to find out they are using the pony&trap Marvel and didn't know how much they suck.

I have to admit I am something of an ASUS fan but if I was going to spend my money on a Motherboard that wasn't an ASUS then Gigabyte is the first and main option I would look at. The reason for this is consistency and not over just a couple of years either. Gigabyte have been churning out very good boards at good prices generation after generation and they always seem to bring reliability to the table too as well as a good range of features.

I see.. cuz TDP wise, a 4770 consumes less power then a Lynnfield at 4.4GHz.

This Gigabyte board also utilizes quite a bit less of the CPU during heavy network traffic.The review on techreport covers that.

Personally, If I were to to go with a board, I'd go with a mid-range Gigabyte, like the UD3H. The good thing about Gigabye boards is that their mid-range boards are built as well as their high-end boards.